Taking Your Thinking Off Autopilot – Segments 4 and 5
By Bill Richardson, PMP
This article is aimed at helping project managers and their teams escape the clutches of The Fifth Constraint, thinking on autopilot, by working through a five-step process. It focuses on operationalizing a more engaged thinking style and how you can implement lasting personal change in this area that stick with you throughout your career. The article also builds on an allPM article in July by presenting the final two action steps in the process.
To read the first installment of Bill Richardson’s The Tyranny of the “Fifth Constraint” please click the following link- The Tyranny of the “Fifth Constraint”: Part One
As to the five overall steps to freedom, they are:
Step 1 – Awareness - taking charge of understanding the problem
Step 2 – Assessment - taking stock of how you think and laying the foundation to change
Step 3 – Action - taking action to become an engaged thinker
Step 4 – Application - taking aim at putting engaged thinking into play.
Step 5 – Assurance - taking the necessary time for lasting change to take hold
Intellectually, the underlying premise for taking yourself off autopilot is learning to think about your thinking. Practically, it is learning to ask the right question versus necessarily having all the right answers. Learning to ask the right questions is best achieved by good old fashion practice or as some marketing visionary said in Nike – “Just do it”.
For you as a project manager, the subject is engaged thinking and the audience is your team, your stakeholders including your sponsor and hopefully even yourself. By engaged thinking we mean someone who is paying attention to their natural human tendencies for patterned recognition, susceptibility to bias and the powerful influence of emotions. Think of each these three oriented to either the future, the present and the past. Patterned recognition is literally your brain identifying what your next step should be in the future based on the patterns it has seen. Emotions live in the present and influence how you interpret things right now and can be positive or negative. Your biases have a history and reinforce and feed off their mental ancestors. They are clearly from the past.
I call these gifts of evolution – “The Three Mindfields” because like minefields in the military environment, patterns, biases and emotions are hidden and encounters with them can be very harmful. Also, just like a minefield, you don’t know that you stepped on one until its too late.
1. Future - The Impact of Patterned Recognition
As the human mind instinctively views the world in terms of patterns based on its memory of past experiences, we automatically see patterns in situations and in sequence of events. While this valuable capability is useful in our ability to function day to day, our compulsion to see patterns, which is primarily subconscious, can lead us astray. Much of project management is a “thinking” activity – planning, analysis, investigation, initial design, proposal generation, specification, business decisions and last but not least, risk management. Proactively coaching and teaching your project stakeholders to know the difference between patterned recognition that supports versus pattern recognition that endangers, is a very good investment.
Remember that the brain will continually want to expand its neural network of patterns and will continually seek to create mental shortcuts especially tailored for you to use in the future. Repetition of the unwanted patterns, while being on autopilot, end up being called prejudice and jumping to conclusions.
2. The Past - The Impact of Bias
Bias is an unconscious belief that conditions, governs and compels behavior. Almost everything we are involved in is driven by a bias. More importantly, a bias is not a conscious mental process – we really don’t have a role in it. The mind does it mostly without our knowledge or conscious input. Therefore we are stuck with bias, whether we want them or not, and unfortunately they influence everything we think about or do. It is how our mind works. It is rooted in our past.
Biases enable us to process new information very quickly by taking the mental shortcuts brought to you by patterned recognition. The speed of this process and the fact that it is unconscious (and uncontrollable) have the effect of strengthening and validating our bias at the expense of the truth. In addition, we tend to give a lot of traction to new information that is consistent with our biases. Conversely, new information that is not consistent with our biases is given low value or outright rejected. Either way, on autopilot, it is a “mind” field
3. The Present - The Impact of Emotions
Interestingly, the mental trait with the greatest influence over our thinking is emotion. In fact, sometimes, as Daniel Goleman wrote in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, emotion is a strong link that hijacks or overwhelms our power to reason.
Our emotions have projective power over our thoughts. They act as filters to form our desires, furnish our capacities, and to a large extent rule our immediate thoughts. As we encounter fresh situations, face novel problems, or grapple with new ideas, our emotional response to each of these sets in motion the initial allocation of our mental resources. In essence, our first "read" of a new situation is always centered in our emotions, feelings, and attitudes. As such, our emotions are laying the groundwork for the thinking that is to come.
This rule of "emotion before thought" is actually quite adaptive. It allows us to act on instinct and initial impressions when we are threatened or in danger. Our emotion provides us with an immediate reaction when there isn’t time to think. In addition, our emotions can direct our thoughts long-term. When we feel empathy for another’s plight, our emotion may help us to direct our energies to doing something about the situation. When we feel joy upon discovering a new idea, our emotion may motivate us to make our discovery accessible to others. Our emotions act as magnets to either pull us into action or channel our energies in a particular direction. Our emotions are also an important means by which we evaluate situations and make decisions about what is appropriate in a given situation.
The role emotions play in shaping thinking may account for a large part of why we see a failure of good thinking in our team members. When our consistent expectations for higher-order thinking still don’t translate into our team members consistently using the critical and creative-thinking skills we have either conscientiously taught them or we know they have, it may be because their initial emotional reactions are carrying the day. In reality, it is not enough to teach thinking skills, we must also pay attention to the emotions that front the thinking process.
As a project manager, your job is ironically not so much how to show your team how to be an engaged thinker as it is to show them how to detect when they have become a disengaged thinker – maxed out on patterns, oblivious to their biases and overdosed on emotions.
Step 4 – Application - taking aim at putting engaged thinking into play
Let’s identify what we want versus what we don’t want. You and your team will be engaged thinkers when patterned recognition is your slave not your master, bias is completely transparent and emotions are understood and harnessed as a necessary part of our human makeup. An engaged thinker is mindful of the now (their emotions), respectful of the past (their biases) and vigilant of future (recognized patterns).
Putting engaged thinking into play is about T.E.A.M.:
- Teach It - Make Your Team Aware
- Expect It – Make It Clear
- Anchor It – Make It Stick
- Model It - Show Your Team How Its Done
Teaching to learn has long been the mantra of the self-help gurus. For me, it is true. I dig deeper and more expansively in subject areas when I teach it. There is a special connection made as you attempt to convey information to students. I say attempt because no matter how effective your teaching style or rich your content, it really comes down to your learner agreeing to take in the information and make it their own. There are many opportunities to teach in the project environment. Here are five strategies to communicate the concepts of engaged thinking to your team and for that matter, your colleagues.
First, educate your team about The Three Mindfields – patterns, biases and emotions.
Second, self regulation. Theoretically, each of your team members should be ready to engage The Three Mindfields. You can use a regular or special team get together to communicate this strategy. Basically, you instruct each of your team members on how to ask themselves the following three questions religiously and tirelessly.
- Am I neutralizing the dramatic pull of my past conditioning by being able to name my biases in any thinking situation? If the answer is no, the quick follow-up question has to be why.
- Am I aware of the emotions currently in play and can I name them specifically? If the answer is no, the quick follow-up question is also why not?
- Am I aware of the mental shortcuts currently in play and can I identify them specifically. If the answer is no, do I need to be alarmed?
Three, introduce the Sponge versus Panning-For-Gold concept. The conventional approach to thinking is similar to the way in which a sponge reacts to water: by absorbing. This approach has some clear advantages. First, the more information that you absorb about the world, the more capable you are of understanding its complexities. Second, the sponge approach is relatively passive, requires minimal effort and is quick and easy especially if the material is presented in a clear and interesting fashion. The primary mental effort involves concentration and memory. However, the sponge approach has a serious disadvantage. It provides no method for deciding which information and opinions to believe and which to reject.
I believe teams generally would rather choose for themselves what to use and what to ignore. To make this choice they need to be using a completely different approach or attitude – a question asking attitude. This different approach requires active participation and is called panning-for-gold. The sponge approach emphasizes knowledge acquisition; the panning-for-gold approach stresses active interaction with knowledge as it is being acquired.
For project managers, this imagery is a way to help themselves and their team stay out of the clutches of autopilot. For example, before reading a project status report, you would think “panning for gold” versus “sponge” and actively (not passively) look for the nuggets of information from the mass of data. Conversely, the next time you prepare a status report, you would apply the process in reverse by communicating the “nuggets” versus serving up the data on one big platter forcing the reader to sift and sort.
Four, the application of a thinking process – Situational Assessment, Problem Solving, Decision-making and Action Planning as outlined in Step 3 – Taking Action section of this article. Whether it’s this process or another one like it, I recommend you formally teach it either by removing your team for a day or two offsite or a regular frequent allocation of time to teach one segment of the process. The hallmark of good team is common goal, interdependence and common process. So, just as having a common process to prepare a project charter pays both time and cost benefits, so will a common process for thinking critically.
For example, in a project team meeting there is an item raised that requires addressing. By having everyone on the team well versed in situational assessment and the supporting analytical processes you as the project manager could delegate the action item to any member of the team. That team member, because they have bought into a process or approach, will do the assessment to determine if root cause is known. If it is not, they will go into problem solving mode, be creative, look at all the potential causes and most importantly, will take the initiative to obtain agreement on the root cause from other team members. Your job is to help your team know where to start in addressing issues and opportunities.
Five, the concept of Reframing is an undervalued technique that can dramatically change what people pay attention to or deem important. By changing what people pay attention to, you open the doors for creativity and ingenuity that previously were closed or not even noticed. By teaching this technique you automatically increase the probability for better risk management, issues management and conflict resolution.
The best way of teaching reframing is to teach Framing Theory which says that how something is presented (the frame) influences the choices people will make. Once your team has understood the power and prevalence of framing, then introduce the concept of changing the frame or reframing. Earlier in these series of articles I used the example of how Alexander the Great reframed his navy challenge and by doing so hit upon the idea of removing the supply of fresh water as a viable military strategy.
The next time you have a project team meeting, pick a situation that presents a serious challenge and first facilitate a discussion on frame being commonly used by the team to view the problem. Once this is agreed upon, facilitate a brainstorming session on alternate “frames” that could be applied. Pick one of the new frames and proceed to examine the problem. The idea is to illustrate how the new “frame” can influence the thinking. If you hit upon a different solution right off the bat, then that is a plus.
2. Expect It.
Expecting to see evidence of each of the items covered in Section 1 is the first step in energizing the thinking process. However, in addition you should see evidence in a number of different ways:
- Situation Assessments that are both comprehensive and accurate in their determination of what action is required next – Problem Solving, Decision-making and Action Planning
- Risk Assessments that are richer in potential threats or uncertainties and response strategies and response strategies that are both creative and focused.
- Conflict Resolution approaches that clearly indicate that all perspectives of a situation have been thought through.
- Issue Logs that record status comments that clearly separate fact from fiction
meetings or in problem-solving meetings.
Expect to have people identifying specific emotions front-ending thinking opportunities and dialogue about how the front-ending emotions could have been dealt with more effectively.
Expect to see recommendations presented complete with a review of the decision criteria used and an explanation of why the alternatives were discarded.
Expect to see peer to peer coaching in situations where individuals have inadvertently let The Three Mindfields have their way.
Expect to see assumptions challenged and not always politely. Your job is to model how to navigate The Emotional Mindfield when form might be lagging a bit behind substance.
3. Anchor It.
Anchoring is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information. In the case of this article, this is exactly what I would like you to do in the context being an engaged thinker. In my mind you can’t rely too heavily on being an engaged thinker who can maneuver safely through The Three Mindfields and teach others how to think more effectively.
For the purposes of application, there are a number of ways you as a project manager can anchor engaged thinking:
- Complete the Thinking Maturity Model Assessment form introduced in Stage 2 – Assessment. This one page assessment form assesses each of the nine key intellectual traits against the four levels of maturity – novice, apprentice, journeyman and master. I highly recommend you consider having your team complete the Assessment on you as the project or program manager and openly share the results.
- Attend with your team a formal workshop on critical thinking and problem solving
- Create an extensive library on books about the brain, thinking and related applications like problem-solving and decision-making. In addition to encouraging your team to take books out of your “library” showcase one book a month for a few minutes in your regular project meetings. The idea is communicate the power and desirability of continuous learning especially in this area.
- Highlight critical thinking and problem-solving as a core competency in your project management competency model and be very specific in differentiating between the various proficiency levels for the competency. By making thinking a core competency you communicate a clear message about expectations and its value to the project management profession
- Develop or buy a set of job aides that can be distributed to all team members depicting process flows for situational assessment, problem solving, decision-making and action planning.
- Constantly promote the important difference between focusing on knowing the right question to ask versus knowing the right answer. Leadership is at least as much about the former as the latter.
4. Model It
The literature on behavior modeling describes its roots in Psychology, and that it is based on much of the work of A. Bandura. Social learning theory, which provides the foundation for behavior modeling, asserts that most behaviors are learned by observation and modeling. It seems clear from the literature that human learning occurs in the absence of direct experience. One does not necessarily need to be electrocuted to know that it is foolhardy to stick a fork in an electric socket. Further, social learning theorists assert that if you as the leader experiences positive reinforcement as a result of a behavior, then your team members are more likely to emulate your behavior. In the context of project management this means that your modeling of engaged thinking approaches will be hugely influential on your team but they need to see it as being successful.
Your job as project manager is to constantly frame analytical or decision-making situations in such as way your team can observe both the process and the outcome. Here are a number a ways you can make this happen:
- When explaining decisions to your team, be sure to elaborate on the decision criteria used and the reasons why the competing alternatives were not chosen. This is modeling a thorough decision-making process.
- Use debating as a means of instigating group discussions on key issues and topics. Debating is all about critical advocacy and how well individuals can make and support arguments with valid evidence. This is modeling the willingness to open up topics up for vigorous debate much like Jack Welch did during the turbulent years at GE.
- Periodically acknowledge efforts and results of your team in the area of critical thinking and problem resolution. Remember, very often people who are good at planning and anticipation very seldom have to display heroic recovery efforts. Acknowledge and recognize people who are quietly effective and how they use these thinking principles to make it so. This is modeling insight and appreciation for planning and anticipation both of which are key thinking skills.
- Openly display situations where you as leader have been over run by The Three Mindfields and what lead up to the issues. This is modeling the desire to share and prevent other people from making the same mistake twice.
- Participate actively in project problem resolution meetings and not always as the chair. Demonstrate for your team how to “wade into the swamp” of a problem and use the common process to get to root cause. This models the perspective that there are problems that you don’t know the answer for either but have confidence in a process and approach that will eventually get to the right answer.
- Demonstrate the art of focusing on asking the right question as apposed to always trying to have the right answer. This models the difference between the sponge and the panning-for-gold approaches.
Step 5 – Assurance - taking the necessary time for lasting change to take hold
While the expectation for immediate results in our instant gratification world are often met, the results don’t last and in fact we slip back to a position worse than where we started. Dieting seems to be the example of choice for this phenomena for most experts. So, it should be no surprise that in making changes in the way we think and apply our brain power, the probability of lasting success achieved in a very short period is also low.
This 5th and final step is about taking the necessary time to make changes and have them stick as part of a new behavioral set. For example, capitalizing on your team member’s gaining a thorough understanding that emotions naturally proceed thinking, will require several opportunities for practicing new skills around 1) recognizing their immediate emotional response 2) challenging their automatic emotional reaction 3) developing awareness of opportunities for effective thinking and 4) acting their way into a new way of believing. Intellectualizing this is one thing. Placing it successfully in play is another.
I recommend three strategies:
- Become a Student of the Organization and People Change Management
- Design Supportive Environments
- Leverage Technology
From an overall professional perspective, I believe that every project manager needs to become an expert in this area regardless. However, for the purposes of this article there are a number of applicable considerations:
- The Change Management Iceberg depicts the overall set of areas for consideration when introducing change. Above the water is the clear issue or problem being dealt with. However, below the water line are three major components - acceptance, attitude and behavior. Within acceptance, there are a number of types of people; promoters and potential promoters, opponents and hidden opponents all of which exist in every change engagement including introducing a new way to think to your team. Understanding the terrain of resistance will dramatically increase your chance of success as the leader.
- The Emotional Responses to Change continuum will also help you navigate this terrain: goes from concern, fear, anger, frustration, sadness, curiosity to self confidence.
- The Sponsorship requirement for change to happen successfully. Recognition of the need for a Sponsor. This role could be you as the project manager but ideally, it should be a role with more elevation and weight in the organization. Could be your boss. Regardless, identify who is fulfilling this role and make sure they understand both the change initiation and change sustaining role.
- Resilience – the Antidote for Change is a concept that says your team will not survive a change effort well if they are not fundamentally focused (i.e. having a clear vision), positive (i.e. self assured), flexible (i.e. pliable), organized (i.e. structured), and proactive (i.e. engaged).
- Transition Risks to be considered – sponsor commitment, change agent capability, target resistance, capacity for change and cultural issues. Asking your team to think differently deserves the same level of change expertise as a large corporate implementation.
Theory of Environmental Design3. Leverage Technology
Conditioning suggests that our genetic make-up combined with the conditioning of our environments create the individual who we are both in business and personally. As our world continues to grow and change, we are increasingly becoming a product of our environments. (How many of you are now tech savvy?) The trick with Environmental Designs is to craft them to craft you. Well designed environments can naturally increase your performance, efficiency, and effectiveness by 2X to 10 X or more. The trick is to choose to become aware of your environments and then become an expert at designing them to support you and your needs.
Your environments can be designed to make things easier for you, to automate processes - whether it be actions, mental processes, or personal habits. Being deliberate about your environments creates a relationship with them, which allows them to support and sustain you in reaching your goals. By creating a relationship with your environments they become much more then tools. There are nine environments influencing our life and our ability to achieve our goals: Memetic, Body, Self, Nature, Spiritual, Relationship, Network, Financial, and Physical
Applicability to Sustaining Engaged Thinking
The Memetic Environment Is Key
The memetic environment is at the very core of environmental design. It includes ideas, thoughts, beliefs, paradigms, styles and usages which are passed down from generation to generation. The memetic environment also includes access to information and knowledge (books, websites, magazines, television, and radio.)
A supportive environment for your team would include access to a library of information about critical thinking and problem solving. Team members would possess various forms of job aides that included flowcharts for situational assessment, problem solving, decision-making and action planning processes. These job aides would also be readily available from the web with easy access to application templates either in the office or externally. Organizationally, critical thinking skills would appear as a core competency and would be publicly valued.
Further environmental work could be considered around the physical dimension for such things as meeting rooms, personal workspace and virtual meeting technology.
Ultimately, one of the more powerful levers for sustaining an engaged thinking approach is the use of technology to support the use of templates, virtual meeting and document sharing and decision support tools.4. Build and Maintain a Thinking Toolkit
Templates for situational assessment, problem solving, decision-making and action planning can be easily loaded for access electronically as required. The templates sustain the engaged thinking approach by providing the format and the appropriate trigger questions. Templates can also be used to build a library of examples team members can access prior to addressing a problem or opportunity.
Virtual Meeting and Document Sharing capability can bring teams together virtually whereby forms, templates etc. can be shared and accessed collaboratively. This approach serves as a catalyst for also keeping The Three Mindfields at bay by simply constantly displaying the reminder questions.
Decision Support Tools continue to evolve in sophistication and when kept in perspective – i.e. the tool is an enabler not the main event, the step by step workflow and quantitative analysis information can be a key sustaining mechanism
While the mind is a power engine for analysis and creativity there are a number of tools we can employ to leverage this powerful engine. Having a tool kit available and kept current can be a very simple way of sustaining an engaged thinking environment. I would encourage you to begin acquiring and sharing with your team even a rudimentary tool kit. To get you started here is list of nine tools a starter kit might include:
- problem restatement
- pros and cons and fixes
- divergent/convergent thinking
- causal flow diagrams
- the matrix
- the decision/event tree
- weighted ranking
- hypothesis testing
- devil’s advocacy
For me the impact of being an engaged thinker on the profession of project management can be summarized in the acronym OPTICS- Opportunities, Problems, Team, Influence, Change, and Stress. OPTICS is a very straightforward way of appreciating that impact and is summarized in Figure 1 below:
A quick way of determining if you have the OPTICS right is to place an X where you currently sit for each of the letters in OPTICS.
For Opportunity the engaged thinker is on the look out for opportunities and is quick to leverage them. Unfortunately this no real impact statistic about missed opportunities.
For Problem the engaged thinker has The Three Mindfields well in hand and is always in hot pursuit of the cure or root cause. Band Aids in projects and in life don’t stick for very long.
For Team the engaged thinker feels part of a powerful team who believe there is no problem or issue they cannot solve. Apathy is like the sponge approach to thinking – mediocrity is soaked up by everyone.
For Influence the engaged thinker is adept at techniques like reframing so as to collaboratively respond to conflict and challenges. Competition wins battles but seldom the war.
For Change the engaged thinker understands the impact of emotions on thinking and how people can get stuck and unstuck in dealing with change. Unmanaged change is every team’s worst nightmare.
For Stress the engaged thinker focuses on understanding the stress cycle and learning better ways to respond and not only trying to eliminate it. Reacting to stress wears a team down over time.
In summary, the Tyranny of the Fifth Constraint, thinking on autopilot, is manifested in missed opportunities band-aided problems, apathetic teams, competitive attitudes and high stress environments. Removing the fifth constraint is about becoming an engaged thinker who literally thinks about their thinking. Getting there is a five step process starting with awareness, moving to assessment of the current state, initiating action, applying a set of principles and being respectful of change that sticks. In the end, it’s about respecting our humanity and leveraging the power of our brain. Through this article I urge you to do both.
As a top tier project management coach, Bill Richardson specializes in helping and championing project managers to their personal best. Inspiring greatness for individuals, teams, communities and organizations, Bill raises the bar for top performance.
Bill is PMP certified with extensive hands-on experience in leading major technological and change initiatives in the financial services industry. He has managed several large-scale project management teams in the IT environment including the setup and day-to-day management of centralized PMO functions. Having worked in a major Canadian Bank in senior positions, Bill brings the unique blend of account management, project management and process management to the realm of maximizing the ROI of projects, program portfolios and people.As an accomplished speaker, facilitator and trainer, Bill brings years of accumulated corporate experience and know-how to project management organizations, leaders and practitioners, strengthening vision and competencies, and delivering the right solutions for winning products. Bill can be contacted at bill.richardson@iil.com or 416-565-0977.